For two hours Tuesday morning, 12 jurors and one alternate seated in a Harris County courtroom were told they would be determining who was responsible for a deadly explosion that rocked a West Houston neighborhood in 2020, claiming lives and damaging or destroying more than 450 businesses and homes.
“We’re going to untie a six-year-old knot,” plaintiff lawyer Rob Kwok of Kwok Daniel told the panel, calling the January 2020 blast at Watson Grinding and Manufacturing “one of the largest explosions in Texas history.”
The lawsuits filed in the wake of the explosion were consolidated into multidistrict litigation for pretrial proceedings. More than 2,200 plaintiffs are awaiting adjudication of their cases. In this trial, which is expected to last about two weeks before Harris County District Judge Denise Brown, a group of business owners whose companies were either destroyed or businesses interrupted by the explosion are suing 3M Company for liability, alleging the company’s failure to properly service a gas detection system caused the disaster.
Kwok told jurors that while this is a “shared responsibility case,” he and rest of the plaintiffs’ legal team — which includes attorneys from The Buzbee Law Firm and Arnold & Itkin — “expect 3M to blame this explosion on everyone and everything but them.”
Experts concluded the cause of the 2020 explosion that killed two employees and one nearby resident was caused by an undetected propylene gas leak. About 600 gallons of the gas filled the facility overnight and into the early morning hours of Jan. 24, 2020. The gas ignited at 4:24 a.m., when an employee entered the building and flipped on a light switch.
The massive explosion could be felt and heard for miles.
The company, which employed about 130 people by 2020, specialized in applying thermal spray coatings to metal parts used in corrosive environments, such as fracking, offshore oil and gas operations, refining, power generation and aerospace. Propylene gas was used in the application process.
Watson Grinding filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy Feb. 6, 2020, and was later liquidated.
But during opening statements Tuesday, jurors heard the January 2020 explosion wasn’t the first serious incident at the Watson Grinding facility.
In October 2008 there was a propylene gas leak that caused a fire and explosion that injured two workers. That blast also damaged the building, and a new one was constructed in 2009, according to a detailed 56-page report released by the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazardous Investigation Board exploring the root causes of the 2020 explosion.
On the shared responsibility point, Kwok told jurors he would not defend Watson, which he said shares blame for the fatal explosion, while noting that “safety systems exist because humans make mistakes.”
“This explosion happened because the safety system failed when it mattered most,” he said.
Kwok said 3M held itself out to be the “experts” in gas detection systems and showed jurors invoices indicating the system in place at Watson had been regularly serviced.
“This is like paying for an oil change and that oil change never happens, and your engine explodes,” he said.
That analogy was flipped on its head by Zandra Foley of Thompson, Coe, Cousins & Irons, who represents 3M. During her opening statement she told jurors what actually happened here is more like getting an oil change, being told the tread on the tires is low, and choosing to do nothing to remedy the problem.
She guided the jury through the same invoices, pointing out the notes from various technicians that indicate there was a problem with the gas detection system not being connected to an industrial computer, called a PLC, that could have alerted Watson employees of a leak.
At Watson Grinding, she said, a “culture of carelessness” permeated the operations. She told jurors the evidence at trial will show Watson routinely failed to follow its own safety checklist implemented after the 2008 explosion, didn’t appropriately repair a gas line in the facility and never acted on the technicians’ warnings about the issues with the gas detection system.
“If Watson Grinding did just one thing different, none of us would be here today,” she said.
John Watson, who was CEO of Watson Grinding until it ceased operations, and Bob White, the company’s former chief operating officer, have both been subpoenaed to testify at trial, Foley said. But she also told jurors that both men in their depositions asserted their Fifth Amendment right in response to questioning about the blast.
“The only reason you do that is because you think your answer is going to get you charged with a crime,” she said, telling jurors if they employ the same tactic at trial “then I think we’ll know everything we need to know about that.”
The first set of cases from the MDL set for trial were brought by the families of the three individuals who died in the explosion, but they settled before trial. The second group to go to trial was made up of five plaintiffs seriously injured in the explosion.
That trial ended in June 2025 with a $37.9 million verdict against 3M and Teledyne-Detcon. In November 2025, a Harris County jury returned a $118 million verdict against 3M for seven other plaintiffs who were impacted by the explosion
The plaintiffs in this lawsuit are Montenegro Enterprises, doing business as New Things Furniture, La Salvadorena Sports Bar and its owner Jose Romero, TXP Investments, Texas Express Plumbing, Casco Industrial Builders, Sam Hoss Enterprises, Tim Tran and Mark Marthieo.
Montenegro Enterprises, TXP Investments, Texas Express Plumbing and La Salvadorena Sports Bar are represented by Rob Kwok, Ryan Loya, William W. Hoke, Ranny S. Sawaf and Marcos H. Cardenas of Kwok Daniel and William R. Moye of Moye Law Firm. Casco Industrial Builders is represented by Adam Lewis of Arnold & Itkin. Mark Marthieo and Sam Hoss Enterprises are represented by Ryan Pigg of the Buzbee Law Firm.
3M is also represented by Thomas Benedict, Kevin Risley and Zachary Nye of Thompson, Coe, Cousins & Irons and Steve Schleicher of Maslon.
The case number is 2020-40596.